Medicaid expansion won’t reduce unnecessary ER visits

Proponents of ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion insist that the expansion is necessary to keep people out of emergency rooms for preventable conditions such as hypertension, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The only problem? Medicaid patients are more likely than the uninsured to use emergency rooms, especially for preventable conditions. In 2010, medical researchers at the...

Proponents of ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion insist that the expansion is necessary to keep people out of emergency rooms for preventable conditions such as hypertension, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

The only problem? Medicaid patients are more likely than the uninsured to use emergency rooms, especially for preventable conditions.

In 2010, medical researchers at the University of California went through a decade of emergency room visit data provided by the National Center for Health Statistics. They broke up this data by type and seriousness of conditions, wait times, age, sex, race, ethnicity, insurance status and various hospital characteristics.

So, what did they find? They found that Medicaid patients were seven times as likely as privately insured patients to use emergency rooms for preventable conditions. In fact, Medicaid patients were nearly three times as likely as the uninsured to use emergency rooms for preventable conditions. During the study period, the odds of using emergency rooms for preventable conditions went down by 10 to 15 percent for both privately insured and uninsured patients, but went up by more than 25 percent for Medicaid patients.

This should surprise no one, given the fact that more than 35 percent of Illinois doctors won’t accept a single new Medicaid patient. Even those who are accepting new Medicaid patients are putting limits on how many they’ll take. If that weren’t bad enough, Medicaid patients are denied appointments with specialists two-thirds of the time. And even when they can see a doctor, they often have to wait longer for care. Children with juvenile diabetes, for example, must wait an average of 103 days just to see an endocrinologist.

The simple fact is that expanding Medicaid eligibility won’t reduce unnecessary emergency room visits. It will simply overload a system already on the brink of collapse. Maybe the General Assembly should spend their time working to improve the current system before they vote to trap hundreds of thousands of new people into a failing program.